I; I ./ i,. / i I v"' /' , / ' If ' ,/ . 111'7 :,1/(/ was peeling off its concrete walls. In the restaurant, a Liberian lounge singer was belting out "Yesterday" and the theme from "Fame" for a handful of lonely whIte mercenaries and West M- rican peacekeepers and their prosti- tutes; she had the desperate brio of a resort performer in the off-season. I hailed a taxi, and as I sat in back, lis- tening to my driver-who was garru- lous with rage, like most men in Abidjan-complain about the traffic, the heat, the econ- 0my, the government death squads, and the ongoing civil i. war , it was hard to believe r llp , . that the ovens of the Pâtisserie '! ' Abidjanaise, across the Charles de Gaulle Bridge, were still disgorging sheets of warm, perfect baguettes. But so they were. Abidjan valiantly clings to the idea that it remains the refined city it was twenty years ago. The University of Abidjan, once an impressive institu- tion, now decrepit, continues to turn out thousands of graduates every term for government jobs or foreign scholarships that no longer exist. In the nineties, the French began to restrict immigration and opportunities to study abroad, just after a catastrophic drop in commodity prices plunged Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer, into deep debt. Toda)T, Abidjan is populated with edu- cated young men and women who have no outlet for their ambitions. "All the generations until 1985 found work- state work, private work," Ousmane Dembelé, a social geographer at the uni- versity, told me. ' goals were satisfied. But after '85, '90, '95, all these genera- tions of youth in Abidjan could find nothing. Nothing." These days, Abidjan looks less like Paris and more like a decaying Third World cit)r. Residents encounter symp- toms of decline on every street, from collapsing infrastructure to violent crime. "It's not Lagos yet," the financial man- ager of an architecture firm told me. "But we're headed straight there." . , T he northern part of Ivory Coast is largely Muslim, and poorer than the mostly Christian south, with its cocoa plantations and Abidjan. On Septem- ber 19, 2002, rebel soldiers from the north mutinied against the government. 70 THE NEW YOR.KER, NOVEMBER. 3, 2003 /' The civil war has regional, religious, and economic dimensions, but its basic cause is political. The mutiny was a violent re- action to several years of anti-northern and anti-immigrant policies pursued by the series of southern Presidents who succeeded Houphouët- Boign During the 2000 election, the Presidential candi- date from the north, a former Interna- tional Monetary Fund official named Alassane Ouattara, was disquali- fied on the dubious ground that he was not of Ivorian parentage. The winner, a history professor named Laurent Gbagbo, from the cocoa region, took office amid riots, during which his supporters killed hundreds of Ouattara's primarily Muslim followers. Since the civil war broke out, at least three thousand people have been killed and more than a million have been displaced from their homes. Throughout the conflict, one of the gov- ernment's favored weapons has been the rhetoric of xenophobia. The taxi was taking me to a rally of Ivory Coast's Young Patriots, a coterie of young men paid by the government to srir up nationalistic feelings against the rebels" who, soon after starting the civil war, oc- cupied the north of the country. The Young Patriots railed with equal intensity against immigrants, blaming them for the country's soaring unemployment rate. At the Young Patriots' rally, I wanted to get a glimpse of their leader, Charles Blé Goudé. The drive to the rally took me near the Place de la République, a public square of cracked concrete, where, in late January; Blé Goudé had spoken to tens of thousands, denounc- ing the French government for failing to rescue Ivory Coast from the rebels. (France, refusing to take sides, had pushed Gbagbo's government to recon- cile with the insurgent forces.) The ico- nography of those demonstrations was remarkable. It was virulently anti-French and desperately pro-American. "U.S.A. WE NEED YOU AGAINST THE 'OLD EU- ROPE,' " one sign pleaded, just a few days after Donald Rumsfeld coined the term. Blé Goudé waved an American flag and delighted the crowd by refusing to speak French. ' e you ready for English?" he yelled, and the crowd roared as he spoke a few clumsy sentences in the tongue of the superpower, which, in Ivory Coast, is . / Ø ':: \// the language of youthful resistance The January demonstrations had led to anti- French riots, and thousands of French expatriates fled the country while young Ivorians spat upon them, attacked their businesses and schools, and tried to block the departure of Air France jets from the airport. The rally this afternoon was in a slum called Port- Bouët, on a waterfront strip near the airport. My driver got lost in Port- Bouët's labyrinthine streets, which were choked with the blue taxis known as woro-woro. About fifteen years ago, the city government of Paris sent Abidjan a fleet of used green-and-white municipal buses, which grew filthy, broke down, and were never replaced or repaired, even as the city's population exploded. The woro-woro run local routes to :fill in the gaps, but their drivers are notoriously reck- less. We passed clogged roads, shanty- towns, and enrire neighborhoods without decent water, power, or sewage systems. The taxi turned a corner, and sud- denly there were hundreds of people crowding around the perimeter of a dirt rectangle the size of a football field. This was Place Laurent Gbagbo. Port- Bouët is a government strong- hold. High-rise housing projects in ad- vanced states of decay ringed the field, and residents hung out from the win- dows, their arms dangling beside their laun A young m.c. was warming up the crowd with a call-and-response that always ended in the word bête, or "stu- pid." The rebels who held the northern half of the country were bête. The neigh- boring countries suspected of arming them, Burkina Faso and Liberia, were bête. The immigrants in Abidjan with Muslim names, who supposedly sympa- thized and even conspired with the rebels, were bête. And the French, who had failed to defend their Ivorian broth- ers and sisters in the hour of crisis-the French were more bête than anyone. For all the hostility in the slogans, the crowd was cheerful, like spectators await- ing the main act of a show they'd seen before. Almost everyone in the crowd was young; most of them clearly had nothing better to do. Boy venders were selling hats in the national colors, orange and green, with the warning "Don't Touch Our Country" and T-shirts de- claring "Xenophobe-So What?" In the front row of a tented seating